The Concept of Noise

– A sentiment after the first round of Music Colloquium

On February 26, our teachers invited Professor Gordon Kampe from Folkwang Hochschule Essen at Staatliche Hochschule für Musik Ruhr in Germany. He showed us a few pieces of Helmut Lachenmann and discussed the composer's "noise esthetics". As a former musical composition and now music technology student, I have been curious about contemporary music and keep learning the new concept to compose. I found composers always try to create new material from one generation to another, especially focus on timbre in recent decades. "The composer's intention was to explore a new sound world and to create compelling and logical musical works based predominantly on sonorities which had remained unused and hence uncontaminated in the past."[2] In my opinion, obviously, the extreme result is the use of noise.

Timbre is merely the combination of pure tones in different vibration frequencies. If we can freely control the frequencies (the pitches) and add them to be a complex tone, we can make any timbre. Thus the timbre is actually pitches. "The need for and the search for the simultaneous union of different sounds (that is to say of its complex, the chord), came gradually: the assonant common chord was followed by chords enriched with some random dissonances, to end up with the persistent and complicated dissonances of contemporary music."[3] After the most dissonant amalgams of sound, "we are approaching noise-sound."[3]

Traditionally, noise means the sound without identifiable pitch; music could be only constructed mainly by "musical sounds" but "noises". There are many "musical instruments" which can be reduced to only several categories even in the most complicated orchestra. "Music marks time in this small circle and vainly tries to create a new variety of tones."[3] Some composers tried to play the instrument in different ways, on surprising parts, and by strange tools; others tried to create the whole new instrument. With the advent of electronic machinery, there came the Electro-acoustic music. Non-musical sounds had more and more important role in composer's piece. "Subjectively, noise is any sound one doesn't like."[4]

"Lachenmann's analysis of hitherto unexploited aspects of the 'anatomy of sound' was at first largely confined to the mechanical and physical conditions of its production."[2] "Today, when science is equipped to help the composer realize what was never before possible (all that Beethoven dreamed, all that Berlioz gropingly imagined possible),"[4] we now have a good chance and abilities to reveal the mystery and to accomplish many possibilities. Former masterpieces could teach us something and give us many ideas, but how to develop from but not depend on those things is our difficult mission. "The musical principles remain the same whether a composer writes for orchestra or tape. Rhythm and form are still his most important problems and the two elements in music most generally misunderstood."[4] Everyone can have the free fancy, but he may not craft or even compose materials artistically if he has insufficient skills to control the basic ingredients within some limitations. Imagination could be the preterhuman power, but only with the understanding to realize it.

"This new art is still in its infancy, and I hope and firmly believe, now that composers and physicists are at last working together and music is again linked with science as it was in the Middle Ages, that new and more musically efficient devices will be invented."[4] Nowadays, in the age of technology, an artist should encourage himself to overcome technical difficulties for the accomplishment of new art. "The present methods of writing music, principally those which employ harmony and its reference to particular steps in the field of sound, will be inadequate for the composer who will be faced with entire field of sound."[1] However, there is already too much noise in our postindustrial society. They have been connected with something else in one's memory. Notwithstanding we can make any new sound, it is possible to be categorized to some kinds of noise in real life. From the audience's view, it becomes the imitation but not the creation. Thus we may fail to aviod the concrete sense experience. Furthermore, we need more noise endlessly, or sometimes prefer the "simple harmonic motion"(not really means the movement of mass on a spring)? Experiment evidence on the effects of different sounds (noise) from the researches in Auditory Physiology and Psychoacoustics is urgent for our complete consideration since there have been convincible facts for Mozart's classical music.

References
[1] Cage, John. "The Future of Music: Credo" from Silence. Wesleyan University Press, 1958.
[2] Mosch, Ulrich. "Lachenmann, Helmut". Grove Music Online ed. Laura Macy, April 03, 2008.
[3] Russolo, Luigi. "The Art of Noise"(1913). A Great Bear Pamphlet, 1967.
[4] Varèse, Edgard. "The Liberation of Sound".